This feeling was intensified in 1887 by a terrific battle between the oil producers and Standard forces in the Legis lature of the state of Pennsylvania. Since the compromise of 1880 the body of the oil producers had been taking no concerted action against the Standard. But their inaction was not due to reconciliation to Standard domination. As a mat ter of fact they were almost as bitter in 1886 as they had been in 1878, when they formed the Union which for two years fought so good a fight. The specific complaint of the oil producers at this time was that they were being "robbed" by the National Transit Company—the big Standard pipe-line consolidation, which had secured by the series of manoeuvres already outlined the monopoly of handling and transporting crude oil. If the oil producers had been making money at this time it is quite possible that they would have paid little attention to the profits of the National Transit Company. The service they got was about as perfect as any human machine could render, and they would probably have recog nised this and been willing to pay high if they too had been prosperous. But the condition of the oil producer in these days was in glaring contrast to that of Mr. Rockefeller. They had piled up oil until there were in i886 over 33, 000,000 barrels on hand. Naturally this had driven prices down. The average price for. the last years had been under a dollar a barrel. In 1886 it fell down to 713/8, and everyone said it must go lower. Embittered and discouraged, the pro ducers fell to comparing what they were getting out of the business with what Mr. Rockefeller was getting. It was not a consoling showing. The Standard Oil Trust had from its organisation in 1882 paid dividends on its $7o,000,000 capital. In spite of the extraordinary outlay for tank-building and seaboard pipe-lines made from 1881 to 1884—$3o,000,000 it is computed to have been—the trust paid per cent. in 1885, ten per cent. in 1886, and Standard Oil stock stood near zoo! In contrast, the oil producer, in 1886, is estimated to have lost about six per cent. on his expenditures, and oil property depreciated one-third in value.* Something was wrong. They could not charge the Stand ard with the price of oil. As long as over 33,000,00o barrels in stock lay on the market it could not rise. But they could and did complain of what it cost them to handle this oil, of storage and carrying charges, of the deductions for shrink age and for loss by fire. If the Standard had not forced out every competing line, there would have been sufficient com petition to have lowered these items—which at the present prices soon ate up the value of oil. And they fell to rehears ing the raids by which the various transporting companies which had fought themselves into independent positions had been forced into combination, their chief grievances being naturally the affair of the Tidewater. In this state of mind, and incited by the Buffalo, the Payne, and the Rice cases, it was natural enough that when suddenly, at the opening of 1887, a bill evidently intended to strike a blow at the Standard was introduced into the Legislature of Pennsylvania, the oil producers rushed pell-mell to support it. The opening sen tence was enough for them. It was "An act to punish cor porations." * This was what they had always sought, some way to punish Mr. Rockefeller for what they believed to be a conspiracy against their interests. The way in which the Billingsley Bill, as it was called from the name of its father, proposed to punish the Standard was to make it a criminal offence to charge in excess of certain rates it fixed—ten cents a barrel for gathering and delivering oil to storing points (the current rate was twenty cents) ; one-sixtieth of one per cent. per barrel a day for storage, with no storage charge for the first thirty days (one-half of one per cent. was the current rate) ; one-half of one per cent. shrinkage, instead of three per cent. Besides, the bill required the Standard to go to any well on application of the owner, it made the company liable for damage, and it required it to deliver oil of like kind and quality as that received.
The enthusiasm with which the bill was greeted was cooled a little by the announcement that as it stood it was unconstitutional—acts to punish being forbidden by the con stitution of the state—as well as by an immediate realisation that the prices fixed for services were in nearly every case less than cost. The bill was immediately amended. When it came back it was at once apparent that, in spite of this pre liminary hitch, a tremendous fight to carry it was being organised by the oil men. Then determination to push it grew in proportion to the Standard opposition. The Stand ard, indeed, realised immediately that unless a hard fight was made the bill would go through by popular clamour, and they turned their big lawyer, Mr. Dodd, against it, set their newspapers—the Oil City Derrick, Titusville Herald and Bradford Era, all of them by this time subsidised organs —to argue against it, and sent Mr. Scheide, one of the ablest of their pipe-line managers, to present their side at Harris burg. They also secured the services of a well-known young Republican member of the Legislature, Wallace Delemater, of Crawford County, one of the counties in the Oil Regions, to organise an opposition to the bill in the Legislature.
In February a hearing was given the bill, Mr. Dodd pre senting the Standard side. It is rare that so able a lawyer has to fight so weak a measure, and Mr. Dodd riddled it easily. As a matter of fact the Billingsley Bill was as bad as it could be. It was characterised by all sorts of constitu tional, legal and practical difficulties. The pipe-line business was an interstate business, and this bill attempted to regu late it—which evidently it could not do. It could, of course, regulate Pennsylvania oil, but, by so doing, it created two classes of oil in the lines, a situation which would have been confusing and undesirable. It was evidently intended that the prices it fixed should apply to the 30,000,00o barrels of stocks on hand, but these were held under contract, and could not be touched. There were many other objections to the bill. Even Judge Heydrick, the able lawyer whom the oil men had engaged to defend it, was obliged to apologise for it at every point, and its most valiant supporter, Senator Lewis Emery, Jr., said frankly that the framer of the bill knew too little of the oil men's needs to be able to make a bill, and that this would have to be thoroughly revised.
In spite of all the reasonable, indeed overwhelming, objec tions to the Billingsley Bill, the oil men clung to it. Mass meetings were held nightly from one end of the region to the other, petitions flooded the Legislature, a big delegation was kept constantly in Harrisburg lobbying for it. The sup port was intemperate, bitter, unreasonable. In March it was intensified by the knowledge that a self-constituted committee of leading oil men were in New York treating with the Standard in regard to certain of the abuses the bill aimed to cure. These men felt that the Standard was unjust in its dealings with the oil men, excessive in its charges, and arbitrary in its service, but they felt that the confusion the Billingsley Bill would bring into the business more than off set the grievances it righted, and they had gone to Mr. Rockefeller to see if matters could not be compromised. Now nothing could have more effectually added to the war like spirit abroad in the Oil Regions at that moment than the suggestion of a compromise. Their cause was being It was "compounding with felony," and when, after a three days' sitting in New York, the committee came home with an agreement from the National Transit Company, making certain concessions—as two per cent. instead of three for shrinkage, twenty-five cents a day per i,000 barrels, in stead of forty, for storage, and with a promise that certain other points should be settled by joint committees—two of the leading members were hung in effigy in Titusville! In April the final vote on the Billingsley Bill came. Har risburg was alive with oil men determined that the bill should go through. The Standard was present, and if it had less of a claque, it had more of the "sinews of war." Indeed, it was charged later by Senator Lewis Emery that the leader of the Standard forces in the Senate received $65,000 for his services—a charge which, so far as the writer knows, has never been either proved or disproved. The bill came to a vote after a passionate wrangle. It was defeated eighteen to twenty five. A storm of violent protest from the oil men's repre sentatives followed the defeat, and the lobbies, the hotels, and even the streets of Harrisburg were scenes in the next hours of bitter quarrels and excited gatherings. When finally the oil men withdrew from the town it was with the under standing that they were to meet two weeks later in Oil City to organise a new protective association. The protests and resolutions passed at their final gatherings foreshadowed no intention of reviving the Billingsley Bill. Indeed, the bill itself had received scant attention from them in the violent campaign over its passage which they had carried on for three months. All their passion had been expended on the Standard. This was a question of whether the Standard Oil Company ruled the Legislature of Pennsylvania or whether the people ruled it—so declared the oil men ; and when their bill was defeated they charged it was by bribery, and hence forth quoted the defeat of the Billingsley Bill along with the Payne case as proof of the corrupt power of the Standard Oil Company in politics. Their outbreak, for it was nothing else, was the culmination of their indignation and resent ment at fifteen years of unfair play on the part of the Stand ard Oil Company, of resentment at the South Improvement Company, at forced combination of refineries and pipe-lines, at railroad rebates and drawbacks, at the immediate ship ment outrages, at the Tidewater defeat. It was revolt against the incessant pressure of Mr. Rockefeller's pitiless steel grip. It was bitterness at the idea that it was he who was reaping all the profit of a business in which they were taking the chief risks, and if things went on as they were that it was he who always would. Out of their burst of passion was to grow a solid determined effort, but for the moment they were de feated, and the defeat, which really was merited, was another added to their series of just and unjust complaints against Mr. Rockefeller.